Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Yet suddenly, once again, the invisible bird of night swooped down on this sunny world of eternal youth and immortality to which I thought I had been securely transferred. Death struck like lightning, bringing down my young uncle Izu from the telegraph pole on which he was working. Father’s younger brother was brought home dead, a few hours after he had left for work. Up there, on that rain-soaked electric pole, the invisible beak had struck. He had fallen in a single spasm, eyewitnesses said. He was seventeen. His face, in death, resembled the faces of those still alive: his father, Benjamin — called by his affectionate diminutive Buium — and his brothers, Aron and Marcu, who stood silent at his bier.

Not long after, the cry of the ominous bird was heard once again. This time it sounded for Grandfather Buium, struck down in the full afternoon summer light. His huge, dark figure collapsed suddenly, on the couch next to his wide-eyed grandson. I was petrified. The sudden crumpling of this Methuselah made my blood run cold. Time froze and I could no longer breathe. I remained there in a daze, until I saw, in the big mirror hanging above the sideboard, my grandmother’s long, pale hand.

There had been some gossip about this statuesque old woman, whom we called Mamaia — though actually she was not so old — about the severity with which, as a young stepmother, she had treated the three orphaned sons of the widower Buium. I was shocked to see her looking at herself in the mirror, smoothing her hair! It was only a few seconds, or perhaps just one timeless second, since she had let out the scream that took account of the disaster. Her gaze met the wide-eyed stare of her grandson in the mirror. Embarrassed, she readjusted her mask of sorrow. Her moaning and gasping increased, but things would never be the same again between her and the grandson.

In an instant, Izu, the youngest of them all, and Buium, the oldest, were gone. Then Mamaia vanished, too, settling, with her daughters Luci and Anuţa, in the faraway Promised Land near the shores of the Dead Sea. Most of the family were to follow, taking with them their ancient names — Rebecca, Aron, Rachel, Ruth, David, Esther, Sarah, Eliezer, Moshe — names that had wandered for hundreds of years through foreign lands and among foreign peoples and tongues, now returning to the place and language where they thought they belonged. The echo of those names would gradually fade, and with them their famed qualities — their mercantile spirit and group solidarity, their anxiety and tenacity, their mysticism and realism, their passion and lucidity. Where did I fit in among all these stereotypes? Had I also been affected by their suspicion, by all the embarrassment and hostility that the environment had injected, insidiously, into all of us?

I no longer felt at ease among the names and reputations of my fellow clansmen, nor did I feel bound by the fluctuations of their nomadic destiny. Had I become alienated from those among whom I had been reborn ten years earlier? In truth, I felt relieved to know that they were safe in their faraway ancestral homeland — and that I was now freed from their proximity. Their vanities, their impatience, frustrations, hypocrisies, and rhetoric were not, in fact, worse than other people’s, but I was happy to be able to forget about them and to no longer be associated with them. I held no grudges against their exodus, it was a proof of normality that I accepted with undisguised relief. The chimera that had claimed me seemed to have created between us a divide that was wider than any physical distance. The geographic space between us came only as a necessary, protective confirmation.

What about my friend Rellu, and what about Periprava? Rellu now strapped on his own nomad’s knapsack and joined the ranks of the dreamers and the rejected. The haste of these emigrants to leave the socialist utopia, each with nothing more than a single bundle, spoke volumes about the impasse they were leaving behind. Never before, not even in the immediate aftermath of war, had so many been in such a hurry to pack up and go. The lines forming to join the exodus were different from the routine lines for food or fuel or clothes, but they were not unconnected. I was well aware of the baggage of memories, passions, and anxieties these nomads were taking with them.

A firsthand account of this moment in history, October 1958, complements my own ambiguous response:

At first the Jews began queuing for their emigration applications to Israel around three o’clock in the morning. Now they start at two, one, and even eleven o’clock the night before. They are ruined small-tradespeople, old people who have no family left, but also Party members, directors, and directors-general in ministries, civil servants in central state institutions, cadres from the political apparatus, from the militia and the Securitate. The impact of the queues is powerful. I am a Jew myself, but even I am beginning to experience strange feelings…

These lines were written by a Romanian writer named Nicu Steinhardt, who continued:

The simple gesture of taking one’s passport out of one’s pocket seems like sleight of hand, it has something of a cheap trickster’s magic about it. Or it seems like something that an odious mama’s boy might do: I’m not playing anymore, I’m going back to Mama. Or it seems like the winning gambler who gets up from his seat, grabs the money, and leaves: I’m going home. I’m not playing anymore. So, you take everybody to the dance, you urge them on, you pay the fiddlers, you get the party going, you cheer them on, you are one of them — and then you just drop out, you leave them all standing there like idiots: So long, I’m leaving. The trick, the scam, the treachery, the lie! Any man in his right mind cannot help but be disgusted, others merely smile. The more simple-minded are piqued, envious, and bear baleful grudges for an eternity to come.

This passage is followed by a narrative on Cervantes and a tale about a traitor, one Judas, a symbol, obviously, of all that Judas and his co-religionists have always symbolized.

The original — but maybe not so original — transfer of hatred, from hatred of others to self-hatred and vice versa, is not difficult to read in these lines. I was probably not immune myself at that time to such miserable subtleties, but I managed to remain more detached than their author, a future Orthodox monk.

Arrested in i960 together with a group of intellectual friends, all accused of “conspiring against the social order,” the writer was condemned to twelve years’ hard labor, seven years of civil degradation, and the confiscation of all personal wealth. Prison for the Jew Steinhardt was a place of revelation, where he found Christ and converted not only to the Christian faith but also to the “heroism” of the Legionnaires, themselves condemned for “conspiracies,” albeit of a less intellectual nature. His subsequent book, A Diary of Happiness , in which he narrates his experiences in prison and the bliss of religious conversion, would become a best-seller and required reading for elite Romanian audiences of the post-Communist period.

My own reaction to the Jews and non-Jews who were choosing to leave Romania sprang from a more private, less grand irritation. As a teenager I had dreams that were radically different from those of the young Jew Nicu Steinhardt, who saw himself as the savior of his hero, Corneliu Codreanu, the anti-Semitic Iron Guard “captain.” I had a different way of assessing the consequences of the heroic “betrothal to Death” promulgated by the Legionnaires. My own Initiation had been nothing less than a mystical betrothal to transcendence, and I would probably have been incapable, even in prison, of asking forgiveness from a Legionnaire for the fact that I was a Jew, as did the new convert to Christianity, Nicu Steinhardt.